About Cats x Coffee x Xstitch
Caution: Contains Light Reading
After not cross stitching for a couple of decades, I happened upon /r/crossstitch on Reddit while anxiously hammering the "random subreddit" button one afternoon in January of 2017. Seeing all the FOs was inspiring, and I was looking for some kind of hobby to ease my neurotic mind. Over the next month I kept going back to look and eventually realised I wanted to rediscover this long-forgotten hobby of mine.
Being ambitious, the first project I decided to tackle was a screen grab from one of the best video games of all time, Earthbound. A Google image search provided me Starman, and using an online cross stitch pattern generator called Pic2Pat, I plotted him out. Over the course of the next six months I became intimate friends with Starman, and I also learned a zillion things about stitching, such as do not use as many colours as possible and the loop start method is your bff and hey, really, the only rule is there are no rules.
A million shades of grey (and purple) 
Starman, pressed and ready to shine
On the way to finishing Starman, Christmas was coming. What better way to celebrate than MORE STITCHING?! That year everyone got a cross stitched work from St. Stacy. A stitch for you! And a stitch for you! Stitches for everyone! And some of them I wanted to personalize, so I forayed into making my own patterns. And as I went along, and became more inspired by Etsy sellers and /r/crossstitch, I had more ideas. For every person I knew, I had an idea in mind. It all snowballed from there.
One day I decided I liked this so much I wanted to share my art and cross stitch pattern creations with people. My original shop, known as Pixierocket Designs, was born in 2018. ...And languished behind the guise of an unfinished website. Deep down, though, I began to realise the name sounded very ethereal and too fantasy-esque for the patterns I actually wanted to make. In January of 2022 I decided my tagline - "cats, coffee, and cross stitch" - was more my vibe, and I began the overwhelming process of retooling it all.
And now, here you are, at CCX, and we are happy to have you. Sit down, sip a latte, pet a cat, stitch a WIP (if you can, around the cat on your lap).
If you're looking for my stitching manifesto, here it is: All my designs are created using MacStitch Pro, and every single design that I sell was made by me, even if it's been done better before, and every single design in my shop I have made it a point to stitch myself. Even if I'm a loser, I can at least still take pride the work I love to do - I don't believe in generating a pattern without trying it to make sure it works out and to iron out the kinks (hah, finishing joke!) before unleashing my creations into the world. As a designer, if I expect you to pay for a pattern from me, you should surely expect some level of quality and not something I threw up onto the Internet to make some quick dollarbucks.
While I do take my work seriously, we should also have fun with it. I hope you enjoy my work and get at least a modicum of enjoyment from stitching it!
TL;DR: I like stitching and I was gonna make this stuff anyway so I tossed it into an Etsy shop in case others might like to make this stuff anyway too.
